As a writer, Diana Wynne Jones has existed in a peculiar state for many
years. Her work is adored by her admirers, adult and child alike, and she has
many fans all over the world. At the same time, a more general public awareness
of her work has been noticeably absent, for reasons that are not at all clear to
me, except perhaps that her novels have had a somewhat checkered history in
paperback publication. The Rowling-fuelled explosion of interest in children’s
fiction has changed this situation, however, and many of her older titles are at
last back in print, alongside more recent novels.

Similarly, although many thoughtful reviews of her novels have appeared in
various magazines, and a number of articles have been published about her work
(many are now available through two websites, “The Official Diana Wynne Jones
Website” at <http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/>
and “Chrestomanci Castle” at <http://suberic.net/dwj/>),
up until now there seems, somewhat surprisingly, to be little in the way of
published scholarly discussion of Jones’s work. What there is has been
conveniently listed by the editors of Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and
Exacting Wisdom, the first volume in a new series on Children’s Literature
from Peter Lang.

In attempting to redress the lack of scholarly attention to Jones’s oeuvre,
the editors have tried to steer a sensible course through the potential wealth
of subjects generated by a body of work which now includes more than twenty
novels, several volumes of short stories, and a work of non-fiction. Inevitably,
given the constraints of publication, they could do little more than scratch the
surface of so large a body of writing. At times, I wished they had chosen fewer
papers and covered fewer topics in greater depth, although I appreciate the need
to give a reasonably broad view of Jones’s oeuvre.

Diana Wynne Jones belongs to that generation of British writers of children’s
fiction -- including Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and Penelope Lively -- for whom
the Second World War was a shared experience, a catalyst for introducing
elements of the fantastic into otherwise realist writing. This was a so-called
Golden Age of children’s literature. No Golden Age is without its critics,
however, and a number of commentators too easily dismiss these writers and their
contemporaries as dealing in misguided nostalgia and producing work irrelevant
to the modern world. However, Karen Sands-O’Connor’s perceptive analysis,
“Nowhere To Go, No One To Be: Diana Wynne and the Concepts of Englishness and
Self-Image,” places Jones’s work at a point where the nature of children’s
fiction shifts from a wholehearted defense of traditional values (Sands-O’Connor
here cites Lively and Philippa Pearce as defenders) toward, at least in some
cases, a recognition that nostalgia can be a source of power, though not
necessarily to the good.

Sands-O’Connor also opens up several other themes in Jones’s work, such as
her deeply significant use of myth, and the way in which she moves from the use
of the preservative (even nostalgic) patriarchal myth of rebirth and renewal
toward a testing, or more often a dissolving, of the boundaries of myth. In the
same way, as an avowed hater of genre distinctions, she effortlessly dissolves
the so-called boundaries between science fiction and fantasy. Noting the way in
which Jones shows that the past fails to inform the present, Sands-O’Connor
further opens this out to examine the ways in which traditional myths often
disenfranchise as much as they empower, marginalizing women, the non-English,
and also, one might argue, children and adolescents in general. Later essays in
the book touch frequently on the awareness experienced by children that their
lives are controlled by unseen figures of authority, more-than-parental figures
who dominate the children’s lives through their inexplicable, almost capricious,
actions.

This brings us to another of Jones’s great themes, that of the power of overt
parental figures. In “The Trials and Tribulations of Two Dogsbodies: A Jungian
Reading of Diana Wynne Jones’s Dogsbody,” Alice Mills notes the recurring
figure of the malevolent older woman in Jones’s fiction and quotes my own
interview with Jones (available at the above-mentioned “Official Diana Wynne
Jones Website”), in which she acknowledges the figure as her mother. While
Mills’s essay explores the malevolent mother figure in Dogsbody (1975),
however, it also inadvertently points up a more serious omission in the
collection: there is no discussion of the family generally in Jones’s writing,
despite its playing a large and significant role in terms not only of the
nuclear family but also of blended families and “families of choice.” Likewise,
alongside the malevolent mother figure stands the ineffectual or otherwise
preoccupied father figure (Wilkins’ Tooth [1973], Archer’s Goon
[1984]), as well as the fabulous, exotic male figure who stands in loco parentis
(Chrestomanci of the eponymous series being one example). For that matter, a
wider-ranging discussion of gender issues in Jones’s work (more ambivalent than
they might at first appear to be) would also have been welcome. I hope other
scholars will remedy this lack.

Perhaps the most central theme in Jones’s work is that of the relationship
between language and magic. Deborah Kaplan and Charles Butler both explore this
issue. Kaplan, in “Diana Wynne Jones and the World-Shaping Power of Language,”
notes that those who can write or tell stories have immense power in Jones’s
work (Nan Pilgrim in Witch Week [1982] is her particular example), while
Butler’s “Magic as Metaphor and as Reality” notes how Jones acts on an
observation of C.S. Lewis’s, that fictional woods have the power to enchant real
ones, that fiction is a way to bring magic into reality. Butler explores the
metaphoric and metonymic portrayals of magic in Jones’s work while Kaplan looks
more closely at the way in which Jones portrays the magical properties of
properly descriptive language. Maria Nikolajeva discusses the fluidity of
language in “Heterotopia as a Reflection of Postmodern Consciousness in the
Works of Diana Wynne Jones.”

In invoking the use of magic, we also inevitably invoke the now-ubiquitous
spectre of Harry Potter. Commentators have speculated on whether J.K. Rowling
has read Diana Wynne Jones’s work, and Jones herself has said she feels sure
that Rowling must have done. Jones’s admirers have been outraged on her behalf
that Rowling has drawn more attention, although it could be argued that interest
in Rowling has brought unjustly neglected titles into print again. Sarah Fiona
Waters’s “Good and Evil in the Works of Diana Wynne Jones and J.K. Rowling”
offers a measured assessment of the two bodies of work, demonstrating that the
two authors both draw on the traditional genres of children’s literature, while
doing very different things with similar raw material and creating very
different moral landscapes as a result. Harry Potter’s moral education is, as
Winters notes, driven by learning which rules to break, which not, while the
protagonists of the Chrestomanci
series (1977-1988) have a very different, more subtle, education, which teaches
them to see beyond the surface of situations and to interpret them accordingly.
This distinction ties in with an earlier observation by Sands-O’Connor about
Jones’s interest in the themes of adult fiction.

Despite the wide range of thought-provoking essays in this collection, there
are disappointments. Donna R. White’s “Living in Limbo: The Homeward Bounders as
a Metaphor for Military Childhood” seemed to me to be more about US military
children than about Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, and I was at a loss to grasp
fully the connections between the two. The argument that during World War II
most British children were military brats does not, to my mind, ring true. The
displacement experienced by British children was that of evacuation which was,
for the most part, a removal from A to B, from home to not-home, followed by a
return to the familiar rather than to the constant establishment of new homes.
Most people who remember that time would, I submit, not see themselves as
military brats but as the civilians they remained throughout.

Akiko Yamazaki’s linking of Fire and Hemlock (1985) to Adele Geras’s
Watching the Roses (1991) in “Fire and Hemlock: A Text as a Spellcoat”
remained tenuous, and the analysis of Fire and Hemlock serves only to
reiterate comments made elsewhere. Karina Hill’s “Dragons and Quantum Foam:
Mythic Archetypes and Modern Physics in Selected Works by Diana Wynne Jones” was
for me undermined by Jones’s own comment in the excellent interview conducted by
Charles Butler elsewhere in the volume, where she revealed that she had read
about quantum mechanics only after she had established her multiverses. It is
typical of Jones’s work that this should happen.

These are minor dissatisfactions, however, with what is, in the main, a
useful set of essays, to be welcomed as the starting point for a larger body of
critical publications on the work of Diana Wynne Jones.

A minor sf writer of the 1950s, Walter Miller wrote one classic novel and
over forty short stories and novellas, one of which won a Hugo, and some of
which have been anthologized for good reason. By default, I seem to be the
“Dean” of Miller studies, but I put off writing a book after my proposal for a
“critical edition” of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) was rebuffed by two
publishers over twenty years ago. The good news is that Rowman and Littlefield’s
“university” imprint found the topic worth a book, but their publishing a book
so poorly organized, researched, and written implies that virtually no standards
are operable in sf criticism and scholarship. Perhaps this review can in some
small measure disabuse the publisher of that assumption. Aside from the 1992
Roberson-Battenfield Bio-Bibliography, this is the first book on Miller. Having
sent me a copy, Secrest could not know that I would review it in print, and I
suspect I must look like a dog in the manger who bites the hand that fed him. My
responsibility to SFS readers, however, requires me to warn them that
there is little in Gloreficemus worth salvaging.

Given Secrest’s stated purpose of providing fans of Canticle with a
“literary analysis” of her favorite sf novel, this book is woefully diffuse and
undeveloped, with a disjointed and incomprehensible introduction, no conclusion,
and no central argument. Out of fewer than 150 pages, twenty-two are blank or
nearly blank (two lines of type). Forty contain appended material: an almost
featureless map, a simplistic timeline, three pages of bibliography, ten pages
glossing foreign and “unusual” words and phrases in Canticle, forty-one mostly
lame plot summaries of short stories, and a two-page index. These ancillary
materials do nothing to advance existing scholarship and there is little
evidence that Secrest used Roberson-Batterfield though she lists it in her brief
bibliography. She mentions Miller’s reticence about his private life and a few
things critics agree or disagree on, and generalizes occasionally about sf in
the 1950s, but claims that her “analysis is based only on what he has written”
(vi), unlikely though that is.

The choice to avoid other resources is unfortunate, but fan writers often
show more enthusiasm than expertise. Backing her assertions with little
documentation, she includes a few footnotes that usually confuse more than they
clarify. By her own admission, she knew nothing about sf scholarship when she
began, and she has done little to correct that lack. She shows minimal awareness
of Miller’s contemporaries, though that might have helped her see what was
unique in his writing. Besides Canticle, he was not known for a great
deal of originality or high competence, but he did show flashes of passion and
authenticity. Secrest also demonstrates little knowledge of history, of Roman
Catholicism, of nuclear weaponry, or of Freud, mentioned twice in her fairly
long but confused section on “women.”

The untitled Part I discusses harmonization, style, plot, elements,
character, setting, time, humor, and vocabulary. The sequence is not
self-explanatory and “Harmonization” (artistic unity) gets only one page, unless
it embraces the entire section. “Elements” (three pages) offers brief passages
on “the flame of knowledge,” “the three [key] deaths,” and “the three endings.”
“Humor” cites three explicit statements in the oeuvre, which she does not seem
to apply to Miller’s work in general and the irony that pervades it. Separated
from setting, “Time” offers two typically brief paragraphs on the European
allegory and the 600-year gaps of Canticle, explaining neither.

Consisting of half the book, Part II, “Themes,” treats conscience, original
sin, the Misborn, women, pain, intelligence, technology, light, space, and Eden.
No more than a few paragraphs are devoted to any topic or its sometimes
tenuously related subtopics. More often than in the first part, Secrest tries
here to “harmonize” the novel with the short fiction, taking consistency to
imply conviction, which is certainly plausible. I would especially consider it
where his work stands out from his contemporaries or relates clearly to Catholic
doctrine, about which he cultivated an attitude of studied ambivalence. She
acts, however, as if any expression of opinion found in narration, dialogue, or
action represents the author’s lasting belief, rather than a conventional
contrivance, compromise for editorial whim, or ironic juxtaposition for
aesthetic effect.

Points worth serious attention include a key character type named for
Miller’s “The Reluctant Traitor,” whose conflict with authority may reflect a
personal characteristic of the author. Secrest notes that he typically poses
artificial light as bad and literally underground technology as good, a
contradiction she does not explore, though it seems related to his overall
ambivalence. She shows a very limited understanding of technology, which hardly
began with twentieth-century machinery (curiously, moreover, she calls
nitroglycerine a “machine”). Although she labels Miller’s fiction as
anti-technological, she notes his regard for technicians as rebels and his
treatment of artificial sentient creations as morally superior to human beings.
A complex of meanings clustered around Original Sin might better be linked to
the argument above. Miller does not use that term, but some of his fictions
posit as hereditary a human need not just to conquer the unknown, but also to
cause pain and suffering. Basing her analysis on the musings of Brother Joshua
in the third book of Canticle, Secrest blames this failing on our
inability to satisfy our longings for perfection. She develops none of these
controversial observations, however, either to resolve contradictions or to
uncover creative results proceeding from these tensions.

Her hit-and-run manner of argument raises more dubious suggestions about
Canticle as well. She identifies all the old Jews with Leibowitz, calls
Brother Fingo’s statue an “exact replica,” and generally shows herself blind to
the novel’s deliberate ambiguities. She calls the Church “defeated” by “the
bomb” (singular), although it dispatches the Leibowitzian Memorabilia to Alpha
Centauri in the care of technologist-monks, to continue the struggle against
irresponsible cruelty and pride. She anoints the Poet as “hero” of the second
book, a role he would certainly disown. She flatly declares that the novel’s
three books mark the respective ends of a new Middle Ages, a new Renaissance,
and life on Earth. Ending the Middle Ages at two points, and declaring the
Renaissance over when it has only begun, she also ignores the novel’s last line
which implies another “season” for the shark, succeeding the vultures in the
previous books. There is little reason in or outside the novel to see nuclear
warfare destroying all life (think cockroaches), and reason today consigns
Canticle to “alternate history,” since Church services have abandoned Latin,
microfilm is outmoded, and our exhaustion of readily exploitable natural
resources makes highly improbable the rise of a new technological civilization
after we lay waste to this planet. I am still chewing on why the poor (e.g.,
Misborn and Simpletons) should have a special value outside Church doctrine, and
how to view Miller’s variations on the sexism Secrest unequivocally declares
endemic to 1950s sf (and apparently only to sf).

It is hard to agree or disagree substantively with ideas that are not developed
or related to meaningful contexts. We disagree on the strength of his
characterizations, which are stronger than those of most of his contemporaries,
but limited by the scope and emphases of sf. Secrest sees them strictly as
stereotypes or argumentative positions, which is true in his weaker stories, but
I see subtleties and personalizing details in the best examples. I also
challenge her reading the author out of the stories, then interpreting them as
expressions of the man thus hypostatized. A man with some allegiance to both
religion and technology, Miller often treated both with irony generated from
their conflict, but Secrest’s treatment of his humor gives irony short shrift.
Though she pays it lip service on occasion, she limits discussion of his use of
language primarily to vocabulary, displaying a simplistic view of writing,
especially in the following: “The ancient yet accurate definition of what
written language is supposed to do is to communicate to the readers just what
the author wants to say” (26). Like many fans, she treats style more as
embroidery than as the fabric out of which fiction is composed. She isolates
departures from convention, some of them eccentricities or typographical errors,
which at most detract from the plot. Ultimately, however, she declares that he
should be “at once reprieved for his experimentation for his own obscure
reasons” (26), reasons she does not explore.

Secrest’s prose does not confer authority on her judgments. What she has to
say is frequently banal or obvious. She uses unconventional expressions of her
own (meticulosity, episodism, dubitable), quaint neo-Victorian formulations, and
staccato flat assertions. Subheads in place of transitions are more accepted in
technical writing than in literary analysis. A good (or bad) example of her tin
ear is the paragraph starting “The Three Deaths” (10): “One notable parallel of
all three sections of A Canticle for Leibowitz is that the leading
characters die at the end. A neat conclusion that allows an entirely new section
to appear since it symbolizes the end of an age, the three deaths are more than
mere symbols” (10). Replete with a sentence fragment, this paragraph is
typically short, and full of problems of grammar, logic, and communication.
Should the parallel not be “between” the sections? Is the Poet in fact the
“leading character” of the second book? Would the characters not die anyway over
600 years? Can three separate deaths be a single conclusion? Can a new section
“symbolize the end of an age”? Finally, if these deaths are “more than mere
symbols,” what are they? She does not say.

It is not enough to say that this paragraph needed proofreading. Inattention
to communication, even on a simplistic level, is visible throughout the book,
suggesting that editors at the University Press of America simply did not care.
In fan criticism, which dwarfs by far what little bit of writing about sf is
produced by academics or professional writers, self-expression usually comes
first, but fan criticism can also be lively, challenging, well-written.
Secrest’s book is none of the above, hardly living up to even her own limited
credentials. A cursory Internet search of her name shows she has managed a
fiction contest, self-published a small collection of her own writings, and in
some small measure “co-edited” with Jeff VanderMeer a praiseworthy fan-published
fiction anthology, Leviathan II (1998). I appreciate the enthusiasm that
prompted Secrest to respond to Miller’s novel, but I cannot understand why the
staff at even a minor or putative “university” press would see her thoughts on
the subject as ready for prime time or hard covers.

Anyone familiar with Peter Schakel’s other works on C.S. Lewis will not be
surprised to find in this study an approach that is sympathetic without being
uncritical. Nominated for the 2003 Mythopoeic Award for Inkling Studies, this
volume employs biographical, artistic, and critical materials in an examination
of the importance of the imagination and imaginative works in Lewis’s life and
writings. Lewis maintained that a well-nurtured imagination, acquired through
receptive encounters with imaginative works, can produce an enriched life, an
enlargement of being, a deepening of faith, and the development of understanding
(2).

The opening chapter presents the reader with an analysis of Lewis’s conception
of imagination both before and after his conversion to Catholicism in 1929, and
how it was shaped by his faith, literary predecessors, and contemporaries. The
near-centrality of imaginative experience in Lewis’s life is manifested in the
complexity of his theories; for him, the imagination proper is the power of
discerning relationships through non-rational processes, such as intuition, to
form unified wholes, distinct from the image-making faculty, which he calls
imaginatio. Imagination can operate at several levels, from daydream, through
artistic invention, up to “Joy,” an ecstatic imaginative encounter akin to
mystical experience (4-6). Schakel also discusses Lewis’s distinction between
the “use” of art, a less imaginative, self-oriented response wherein familiar
elements of the work are employed for independent creative activity, and the
“reception” of art, a surrender to the work that allows it to engage one’s
imagination fully, enriching one’s experience of life (13-14). Focusing on
Lewis’s theoretical texts and autobiography, Schakel contextualizes Lewis’s
ideas in terms of his position among contemporary critical theorists, and the
ways in which his ideas partially anticipated reader-response theory.

The second chapter begins with a look at Lewis’s relationship with books as
objects; biographical materials are employed in giving us a glimpse of the
author as a reader, whose experience of literature involves not only the text
itself, but all the conditions under which a text is encountered. Books and
readers in his fiction are portrayed in ways that echo this understanding of the
reading experience; and the publication history of the Chronicles of Narnia
(1950-56) is examined in terms of variations among different editions and how
they might influence readers’ experience of the tales. In the next chapter
Schakel enters into the debate over the “correct” reading order for the
Chronicles. His argument -- that the original order of publication is more
dramatically effective, and thus better -- reflects Lewis’s primary interest in
the reader’s imaginative experience.

Chapter Four explores Lewis’s contribution to literary theory in his
treatment of fantasy and romance, narrative types frequently dismissed in
literary criticism. Lewis examines this issue discursively in “On Stories,” and
artistically in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952) when Eustace is
turned into a dragon, and thus forced to endure in reality a fate he might have
experienced imaginatively had he not limited his reading to purely expository
material (54). Evocative suspensefulness, atmosphere, and mythopoeic elements
are examined as aspects of romance and fantasy that contribute to their appeal;
Schakel points to each of these in turn as vital features of Lewis’s fiction.
This discussion is followed by a chapter on the use of narrators in Lewis’s
Chronicles and Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45). In comparing these series,
Schakel concludes that greater artistry is exhibited in the handling of the
Chronicles’ narrator than in Lewis’s series for adults, which is “unusual …
[and lacking] subtlety or sophistication” (72).

Chapters Six and Seven cover music and dance, respectively. While Lewis was
deeply engaged by music, his appreciation of dance was more abstract; he found
it appealing as an idea, but its practice did not interest him. In his fiction,
nonfiction, and poetry, both music and dance appear in connection with the idea
of an ordered, hierarchical, and harmonious universe, a notion derived from
Western cultural traditions and consistent with his metaphysics. Chapter Eight
provides an overview of the appearance of visual arts, architecture, and
clothing in his works and what roles they played in his private life.

The final chapter examines the idea of “moral imagination” -- the means by
which intellectually recognized ethical principles are internalized and made
meaningful -- and Lewis’s belief that artistic imagination could, without
resorting to overt moralizing, produce greater moral sensitivity in the
audiences of the various arts (163-64). A defense of Lewis’s use of magic and
witches in the Chronicles appears next, followed by a more lengthy
defense of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. These last sections seem to be
aimed at a more specific audience than the rest of the text, and the analysis of
Rowling’s work, as an application of Lewis’s perspective, is not nearly as
convincing as the arguments contained in the rest of the work, which are
generally meticulous, well-supported, and sound.

Unlike Thomas Renzi’s H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted to Film
(1992), which examined only ten of the films based on Wells’s better-known
scientific romances, Don G. Smith’s lucid, accessible book “examines every
theatrically released film from 1909 to 1997 (both credited and uncredited)
based on the writings of H.G. Wells” (2). Surprisingly, books on Wells’s works
turned into films are few and uneven. Smith’s tidy yet complete book, a welcome
addition to the field of Wellsian scholarship, appeals to both the scholar and
the lay reader.

For the scholar, Smith’s book provides a useful index, an excellent annotated
bibliography, and insightful readings of Wells’s texts, including the lesser
known works. As an sf scholar himself, Smith rightly privileges Wells’s texts
over the films based upon them. He also argues, however, that Wells’s legacy for
sf fans will be his films (as uneven as they sometimes are).

The 19 chapters in Smith’s study include a brief but useful introduction,
chapters focusing on individual works by Wells and the films they spawned, and
an afterword. In each of the central chapters, we move from a review of a
particular text, to a film synopsis, to adaptation, to production and marketing,
to the film’s strengths and weaknesses, finally arriving at a rating of the
film. Scholars will appreciate Smith’s thoroughness and attention to detail
here. While Smith is frank about not having seen all the films based on Wells’s
work, neverthless the overall impression is that he has done a thorough job.

In addition, Smith frequently uses lobby-card photos as an ingenious way to
comment on films he couldn’t view. In “Wheels of Chance” (1922), for example, he
suggests that, although this silent film is lost, the only existing still photo
“suggests at least some adherence to the Wells novel” (57). For the scholar such
a comment may prove useful. For a more popular audience, however, the lobby-card
scenes are a real hoot. In chapter 5 on “The Invisible Man,” one photo features
Virginia Bruce from the film The Invisible Woman (1940) posed seemingly
naked in a sexually suggestive way, while another of the actors in the photo
appears to be moving towards her with hands open and extended in her direction,
his eyes bulging out of his head. The reproduced lobby-card scenes are part of
the magic of this book.

Also noteworthy are Smith’s anecdotes on film production. We learn that John
Barrymore, in the later part of his acting career, for example, had to cut up
his script and place parts of it around the set of The Invisible Woman
(1940) “on vases, behind phones, on the backs of other actors” (76), because he
was too drunk to remember his lines.

Clearly at home in the sf genre, Smith, who wrote The Poe Cinema
(1999) and Lon Chaney, Jr. (1996), understands his reading public. In
commenting on the reception of one of the films inspired by The Island of Dr.
Moreau (1896), Smith allows that the best thing about the film was that it
forced its audience to think. Alas, Smith is only too much on target, I fear,
when he suggests that “in America most people don’t go to the movies to think.
They go to buy popcorn and be entertained” (53). Smith knows too well that
Wells’s philosophical side must be faced by readers in his printed texts. For
average viewers, however, the popcorn movies of Wells’s works will have to
suffice. With the help of Smith’s book, perhaps the careful reader may be able
to bridge the gap between texts and films. Wells’s mother wished for him to
apprentice as a draper (and some of Wells’ works both in print and in film make
reference to this notion as Smith duly notes). However, the world has, no doubt,
been better served with Wells as the dean of sf authors, as Smith asserts.

As we consider the present boom in British sf, this special issue of
Conjunctions reminds us that Britain’s former North American colonies are
booming as well. Conjunctions is the literary magazine of Bard College
and its general editor is Bradford Morrow, but he handed guest-editorship to the
accomplished horror writer -- and editor as well, judging by this volume --
Peter Straub. Straub turned issue #39 into something like a representation of
the state of contemporary fantastic fiction. The issue is not meant to form a
definition, certainly. Such a project would be not only impossible but
antithetical to the present state of the field, as becomes apparent in the
collection’s introduction by Straub, in its critical essays by Gary K. Wolfe and
John Clute, in the eighteen short stories by a wide range of writers, and even
in its illustrations by Gahan Wilson.

After years of scholarly struggle to define the field, most of us have
recognized the frustrations of capturing definitively a body of literature that,
though treated as genre writing in curricula and the marketplace, defies genre
boundaries. In the March 2002 issue of SFS, the journal still stated its
purpose as publishing “on all forms of science fiction, including utopian
fiction, but not, except for purposes of comparison and contrast, mythological
or supernatural fantasy.” After much discussion among the board of editors, the
next issue, July 2002, reflected the journal’s coping mechanism for this
boundary defiance: now it publishes “on science fiction, broadly defined.” The
change recognizes the collapsing of science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres
by both authors and publishers; the difficulty and futility of separating genre
sf from the productions of mainstream writers such as Vonnegut and Atwood, who
both enact and deny the protocols of sf; and a growing emphasis on permeability,
transgression, liminality in a criticism that has long stopped limiting itself
to the literary but has become more “broadly defined” as cultural studies.

In this ineffable new world, it is no wonder that Gardner Dozois, discussing
Conjunctions 39 in his Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual
Collection (St. Martin’s 2003), expresses exasperation along with
admiration: “most of the stories fall somewhere on the line between fantasy and
slipstream/surrealism/Magic Realism/whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-month”
(xxi-xxii). Dozois complains that:

it’s hard for me to perceive that any coherent critical argument is being
made here, or to discern why this particular group of authors are [sic] “New
Wave Fabulists,” or what makes them so, or what that term means ... ; it seems
instead like the partially random selection of authors you’d get assembling
any original anthology, depending largely on the luck of the draw, rather than
a list of authors collected with critical rigor or to demonstrate some
particular mode or emerging school of fiction. (xxii)

Perhaps that random assemblage might be seen as a sample randomly selected to
illustrate the range of work being done in sf, in speculative fiction rather
than science fiction. Perhaps random sampling is more helpful than definition at
this moment in sf. Of what, then, does this particular random sampling consist?
And what, if any, emerging modes or schools of fiction does it demonstrate?

The table of contents embraces British, Canadian, and American writers;
writers of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and graphic novels; established and
newly successful writers. Of the fiction writers, one can say that they have all
published fiction within the genres of sf, fantasy, and horror -- that they have
acknowledged an allegiance to genre fiction. One can say also that they employ
the protocols of the fantastic genres and benefit from readings that deploy
those protocols. Finally, one can say that the contributors form a who’s who of
writers’ writers, not necessarily the people everyone has heard of, but of the
people insiders (other writers, scholars and critics, reading fans) admire.
Indeed, I would imagine that many people reading this review would buy the
volume based on its table of contents, without any other consideration being
necessary. Specifically, the fiction writers in that table of contents are, in
order of appearance: John Crowley, Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Peter Straub,
James Morrow, Nalo Hopkinson, Jonathan Letham, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville,
Andy Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Patrick O’Leary, Jonathan Carroll, John Kessel, Karen
Joy Fowler, Paul Park, Elizabeth Hand, and Neil Gaiman.

The quality of the stories is uniformly fine, as its table of contents would
lead one to expect. Dozois, in spite of his complaints about the anthology’s
coherence, says it may be, “in terms of literary quality, the line-by-line
quality of the writing, the best anthology of the year” (xxi), although he
doesn’t select any of the stories for his own anthology of the year’s best. It
would be hard to imagine that there was a better genre anthology in 2002. I
counted nine stories that I thought were exceptional: I would particularly
commend Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” Link’s “Lull,”
Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” Morrow’s “The Wisdom of the Skin,” Haldeman’s
excerpt from Guardian, Wolfe’s excerpt from Knight (both extremely effective as
stand-alone pieces), Kessel’s “The Invisible Empire,” Fowler’s “The Further
Adventures of the Invisible Man,” and Hand’s “The Least Trumps.”

Crowley’s story, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” has nothing
fantastic in it, but its treatment of photography and drama, the polio epidemic,
and the ages of man and woman, all are charged with a frisson that comes from
the fantastic, much as his recent novel, The Translator (2002), was.
Link’s “Lull” begins with men telling stories around a poker table and morphs
like a dream into traveling backward in time, mysterious houses and recluses,
stories within stories, and pod people, coalescing into a story about
disaffection and loneliness. Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango” reads like a book of
the New Testament, complete with beatitudes and an epistle, but Christ is a jazz
collector named Little Red. Morrow’s “The Wisdom of the Skin” offers as its
novum a new art form, sex art. Haldeman’s excerpt from Guardian follows
an old woman’s intergalactic tour, à la Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930),
guided by a raven. Wolfe’s excerpt from Knight is an atmospheric, allusive
coming-of-age story set in a world in which pre-Christian mythic figures appear.
Kessel’s “The Invisible Empire” imagines a female version of the Ku Klux Klan,
fighting male abuse rather than racial mixing. Fowler’s “The Further Adventures
of the Invisible Man” describes the agony of being bullied from the viewpoint of
a young boy -- all the fantastic elements residing in the boy’s reading
material. Hand’s “The Least Trumps” combines a tattoo artist, a tarot deck, and
an imagined series of books called Five Windows One Door. One of the characters
in Hand’s story attempts to explain what makes the series so wonderful: “They
made me think how the world might be different than what it was; what we think
it is” (383). That is what all these stories provide: a lens that both clarifies
and dislocates. The other nine stories, though I slight them here, also provide
such a lens, and one could fairly say that a further commonality of the
collection is the uniform excellence of its selections.

Yet it remains true that the collection is not a demonstration of some
emerging mode or school of fiction, as the volume’s title, New Wave Fabulists,
might suggest. That title raises some difficulties. First, “New Wave” has
specific reference to an earlier British boom in sf, associated with Michael
Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds (1964-70), and which caused an
earlier definitional crisis with its de-emphasis of the hard sciences and its
concern with literary style. Of the writers associated with that new wave, only
M. John Harrison is present here, though both Gene Wolfe and Joe Haldeman
represent the earlier wave on the American shore. “Fabulist” gestures back to
Robert Scholes’s spin on sf, Structural Fabulation (U of Notre Dame
1975), which even then saw science fiction as “loosely” defined, and considered
“varieties of modern SF” and “borderline or extreme cases” (ix). More than 25
years have passed since Scholes wrote his book, almost 40 since Moorcock began
his term at New Worlds, so the problem of defining or of even pinning
down a sensed commonality or trend into a coherent mode or school has been
around for a long time. The title, as it turns out, was the suggestion of
Conjunctions’s general editor Brad Morrow (email to author July 29, 2003).

Sometimes the urge to name gets us into trouble, but it, like the random
sample, may allow us a better container for an ineffable entity than definition
does. Gary Wolfe and John Clute, in their essays at the end of Conjunctions
39, offer some other names, less troublesome than “New Wave Fabulists.”
Wolfe’s essay, “Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre,” continues to develop his
thesis that “the fantastic genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy have
been unstable literary isotopes virtually since their evolution into
identifiable modes” (405).1 In Conjunctions 39, Wolfe looks at
nineteenth-century precursors, pulp fiction, and twentieth-century genre
anthologies before arriving at a tempting name: “recombinant genre fiction:
stories which effectively decompose and reconstitute genre materials and
techniques from an eclectic variety of literary traditions” (415). As
beautifully as this seems to describe what goes on in the present volume, it
actually refers to the new wave of the last century which he sees as on a
continuum with the present moment. Wolfe persuasively argues that none of the
authors represented in the volume “can be read fully without an appreciation of
their use of genre materials ... but none can be read with only an appreciation
of those materials, either” (417). He concludes his essay with the idea that
these writers “view the materials forged in genre as resources rather than as
constraints” and he then offers a name for the fiction that this volume
represents: “the postgenre fantastic” (419). That would make a good title.

John Clute’s essay, characteristically gnomic, offers several names that “might
come in useful” in discussing fantastic fiction at this moment (421). There is
the “Club Story,” a frame tale, a story “which enforce[s] witness” (421-22).
There is “Equipose,” comprising “stories set in worlds which are impossible but
which the story believes” (424). He also offers “Portal/Cloaca” for entries to
and exits from fantastic worlds (425), and “Twins” which “represent a locus for
some original part of our lives that remains in situ when the world turns so
fast we leave something of ourselves behind” (426). All these terms help Clute
describe the project of the fantastic since 1800, which he sees as “making
storyable our profound anxieties about a world whose claws are Time” (428). He
goes on to discuss stories from the collection using these terms and his names
refer not to the body of works but to the devices they employ -- know them
by their works. For him, all the stories are part of “a conversation with the
Ocean of Story,” with each “an autonomous story that has not ever been told
before, that is, at the same time, a conversation with siblings” (431-32).

We sense the family resemblance among the sibling creations here, whose
conjunction has enacted a conversation about the present state of fantastic
fiction/postgenre fiction/new wave
fabulists/“whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-month.” That includes Gahan Wilson’s
illustrations, simultaneously silly and serious, grotesque and graceful, like so
much genre fiction, like this collection. And there’s one illustration for each
story.

While Conjunctions 39 does not offer a cohesive unitary vision of a
particular movement, it does offer a representation of an exciting moment in
speculative fiction, a moment characterized by its tendency to push against
unified cohesiveness, a liminal moment that might better be named the postmodern
fantastic or recombinant genre fiction than new wave fabulist, or that might
better remain unnamed. Named or not, coherent or not, it is a significant moment
in a “conversation with siblings.” I suspect that Conjunctions 39 will
become a momentous conversational gathering, like Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous
Visions was for the New Wave in 1967 and Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades
was for cyberpunk in 1986. In other words, Conjunctions 39 promises to be
a very important anthology indeed.

-- Joan Gordon

NOTE
1. Wolfe explores this idea in more depth in his essay “Evaporating Genre:
Strategies of Dissolution in the Postmodern Fantastic,” in Edging into the
Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, ed.
Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (U of Pennsylvania P, 2002), 11-29.

Most experienced readers of speculative fiction can recognize the tropes that
inform it but few have more than a fuzzy idea of how these tropes came to be.
Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and his nameless monster did not leap
unheralded from the brains of their creators but evolved out of a long history
of fantastic characterization. Fantastic Metamorphoses by literary
scholar Marina Warner is a book about these origins. In her introduction Warner
writes that in her 2001 Clarendon Lectures in English she wanted to explore
further and deeper the unstable, shape-shifting personae and plots I had come
across in fairy tales, myths and their literary progeny, in order to uncover the
contexts in which ideas of personal transformation emerged and flourished, and
to offer some historical background to the current high incidence of the
phenomena in poetry, fiction, films, video games. (2)

Warner, author of From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their
Tellers (1995), a critically acclaimed book about the origins of fairy
tales, and one of the most highly regarded contemporary historians of literary
tradition, provides a literary timeline for fantastic transformation. Beginning
with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and then examining fantastic visual images in
the painting of Renaissance artists such as DaVinci, Michelangelo, and
Hieronymous Bosch, she goes on to examine how cultural cross-pollination,
colonization, and scientific discovery can inform the fantastic fiction and
poetry of an era. In doing so she creates a taxonomy for looking at fantastic
characterization: mutating, hatching, splitting, and doubling. These categories
form the central four chapters of the book, surrounded by an introduction and an
epilogue. The book also contains seven full-color plates and 38 black-and-white
illustrations.

Mutating refers to the physical process of metamorphosis, shape changing,
becoming other. It is a process marked by hybridity, the mixing of two things to
get a third, certainly a hot topic in contemporary literary criticism.
Metamorphosis by definition mixes the qualities of two distinct known
identities. Ancient mythology provides many examples of hybrid creatures such as
centaurs, griffins, satyrs, and green men. When Warner examines Bosch’s painting
“The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1504), she finds a striking “cornucopia of
metamorphoses” (34), people coupling and merging with fruit and flowers. Bosch’s
surreal images of naked innocent youth engaged in “an orgy” “of weird acts with
fruit” enters into “dangerous territory” (44), mind-boggling, bizarre, and
profane, and yet there appears to be no punishment for such excess, no old age,
no carnality, no death:

The fruits that the orgiasts are sampling are seeds, or clusters of seed:
in the case of strawberries, they bear achenes, or small hard pips on their
exteriors. Several pods are bursting and spilling seed; the largest husks and
galls are hatching people, and some pupa-like casings in the foreground are
splitting open, as if human beings belonged to a natural non-sexual food chain
involving birds, insects and fruits. (57-58)

Considering the scientific exactness with which each fruit is depicted, the
painting itself becomes science fictional: a vegetarian, prelapsarian, utopian
vision that implies Bosch’s up-to-date understanding of the sexual life of
plants. The other paintings of his triptych depict “trouble-to-come” within the
Garden of Eden, and sinners gruesomely punished in a markedly carnal Hell (48).
Thus, “The Garden of Earthly Delight” is a Golden Age to which we can never
return. Warner suggests that “classical myths and the earliest reports of New
World legends may have shaped [Bosch’s] fantasies of a false paradise” (113).

Hatching is a process of natural metamorphosis, as opposed to simply changing
from one thing into another without an organic reason. Warner writes that in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, new knowledge about the life
cycle of animals and insects profoundly affected how we viewed ourselves.
Hatching was a potent image of change that was not fully understood by earlier
artists and writers. Reginald Scott, for instance, was serious in The
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) when he quoted Pliny the Elder on the
importance of cracking “the shell after eating a boiled egg for breakfast in
case witches will set sail in it” (76). Works by artists of the same period like
Cornelius Bos and Da Vinci show the rape of Leda by Zeus who takes the form of a
swan. Their offspring Helen, Clytemnestra, and the twins Castor and Pollux are
shown hatching out of eggs. In early times many believed the legend to be
literally true. “The temple of the Leucippidae in Sparta even displayed shards
of a gigantic eggshell said to be the very one she laid” (99). While Maria
Merian was making prints of a butterfly’s complete life cycle (Paris, 1726),
others such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau were for the first time becoming interested
in the lives and development of children (84). Warner suggests that people now
saw the emergent butterfly as the vital essence (soul) that was inherent within
the cocoon and in all the previous metamorphic stages (90). A paradigm shift had
occurred in the human mindset that allowed creatures to change shape and still
maintain an essence that had been there from the beginning. This made it
possible for even stranger artistic visions. When, in Metamorphosis
(1915), Kafka’s Gregor Samsa becomes a huge beetle, Samsa is simply exhibiting
the outward appearance of an inner essence that had been there all along. Kafka
implies that Samsa’s psyche had become that of a bug (115).

Splitting suggests a process by which an individual’s consciousness or
volition can be split from his or her body. A zombie is a body that no longer
operates under its own volition. The word “ zombie” entered the English language
in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, published between 1810 and 1819
(119). Zombi initially referred to a leader of escaped slaves who had been
chosen for his leadership and valor. Nzambi was also the Angolan name for the
Deity (120). Gradually, however, the word began to refer to someone totally
controlled by another, the soulless, living dead, and began to occur in many
stories that came out of Africa and the West Indies. Warner suggests that
zombies have become a popular cultural icon because they exemplify some
dehumanizing aspects of modern life: “work turns people into zombies; other
people turn people into zombies; life does it (so do committees)” (123).

The diasporas of slavery, also discussed in the chapter on splitting, brought
corresponding diasporas of stories about black magic, voodoo, and witchcraft
that cross-pollinated in the Caribbean and combined into Creolité (132), a
creolization of religious influences that “composted” in the region (141). In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the intriguing aspects of spirit cults
and dark religions were manifest in many stories, including Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, Coleridge’s poetry, the seventeenth-century plays of John Dryden
and William Davenant and, later, in Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel masterpiece, Wide
Sargasso Sea (141, 154). The popular classic Aladdin, with its enslaved
genii of the lamp, appeared first in 1702 in Antoine Gallard’s A Thousand and
One Nights (144). Genies could do anything. They were agents, channelers, of
an immensely powerful Master, who never appeared but was, perhaps, the first
dark lord of popular fiction, progenitor of Sauron and Voldemort (145). The
Master Genii Enslaver lived inside the egg of the magic bird, the Roc, which, of
course brings us back to hatching (144). Although some early versions of Aladdin
had an anti-slavery undertext, by the late Victorian Age stage productions
reflected a changed language of power, “Steam, Gas, Mechanical and Limelight
Effects,” taking it one more step in the direction of what would eventually be
called science fiction (148-49).

Doubling refers to hauntings by doubles or alter egos, as well as to dream
journeys like that of Alice when she falls down the rabbit hole or enters the
looking glass (162, 189). The term doppelgänger or “spirit double” entered the
language about 1830 in a poem by Heinrich Heine and may have been a partial
product of the new science of photography (161-62). Around 1863, in a poem that
opens “One need not be a Chamber / To be haunted,” Emily Dickinson writes of
“Ourself behind ourself, concealed” (164). Nineteenth-century novelists from
Mary Shelley to Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson were much affected by
the young physical and social sciences of the time. Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886) demonstrates a semi-scientific process in which Jekyll is able
to split off part of himself, his conscience, to create the lust-driven Mr.
Hyde. Warner suggests that the writings of Freud on the unconscious popularized
the awareness that behavior could be driven by concealed or unconscious desires
(164). Emotionally conflicted people are of two minds: the inner person can
drive behavior without the outer person being fully aware of it. Just as there
is an inner person, there is an inner eye, a place where the Neoplatonists
believed creativity took place (172). Freud himself was considerably influenced
by F.W.H. Myers, who coined the word “telepathy” in 1882 (196). Myers’s mammoth
work, Phantasms of the Living (1886), and his posthumous Survival of
the Human Personality after Bodily Death (1915) were enormous compendiums of
multicultural supernatural experiences, including those of the séance-loving
Theosophist movement in North America (196). Warner suggests that today the
science of cloning presents many possibilities for further pondering of personal
identity (202).
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare writes:

But all the story of the night told over
And all their minds transfigur’d so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy.

Warner uses this epigraph for the book’s dedication page and she ably shows
us that fantastic characters have achieved great constancy within our cultural
and literary traditions. When she writes “figures of speech turn into figures of
vitality,” Warner is describing how art comes to life (169). Fantastic literary
characters like Pygmalion, Prospero, and Alice have taken on lives of their own
and achieved astonishing longevity through time, but all does not remain the
same. Where there is life there is change. Warner concludes that “metamorphosis
embodies the shifting character of knowledge, of theories of self, and models of
consciousness that postulate the brain as an endlessly generative producer of
images and of thoughts, selected from and connected through fantasy, observation
and memory” (202). The key word, of course, is shifting. Each generation filters
fantastic characters through the lens of their own experience.

It is an enormously ambitious task to examine the history of fantastic
metamorphosis. In her introduction Warner writes that she wants to examine ideas
of “personal transformation” as well. Overall, Warner is better at demonstrating
the character of fantastic “otherness” than that of personal transformation. One
can argue that any artist’s image (however strange or fantastic) must begin in
his or her own mind’s eye and that an act of creation enacts further change
within the creator but this process is perhaps best left to philosophers and
psychologists.

Marina Warner, with six honorary doctorates and countless other awards and
kudos, is doing definitive work here. Her writing is accessible, brilliant, and
insightful. Her taxonomy for classifying fantastic characters could prove to be
very helpful in analyzing fantastic fiction. Even as I was awed by her grasp of
history, however, I could not help but see that Warner neglects genre. Her
timeline stops at the turn of the twentieth century. She excludes mention of
early pulp writers such as A. Merritt (who was influenced by the Theosophists)
as well as work from the many fine writers who are producing relevant
contemporary speculative fiction: hybridity in Octavia Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89);
mutation in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), Kathleen Ann Goonan’s
Mississippi Tetrology (1994-2003), and Carol Emschwiller’s Carmen Dog
(1990); hatching in Amy Thompson’s Color of Distance (1995) and
metaphorical hatching in any number of stories when space travelers awaken from
cold sleep; splitting in Charles de Lint’s Onion Girl (2001) and Joan
Slonczewski’s Brain Plague (2000); and doubling in Michael Swanwick’s
Bones of the Earth (2002). Although The X-Files is mentioned and
Phillip Pullman’s young-adult fantasy is discussed, Warner’s discussion of
contemporary fantasy is primarily limited to slipstream fellow travelers like
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997) and Tony Morrison’s Beloved
(1998). She mentions no science fiction later than Philip K. Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). It would have been a much stronger
book with another thirty-page chapter devoted to the above or comparable works.
Without contemporary speculative references, Fantastic Metamorphoses,
with its six chapters and 264 pages, becomes too slender a volume. Recommended
for historians, serious fans, and teachers of speculative fiction.

Every now and then a teacher will drop a single line that stays with you
forever. For me it was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when Vance Bourjaily,
leaning up against the blackboard and carefully rolling a cigarette, said, “When
we talk about structure in a novel, all we’re really talking about is the way
the author handles time.”

I’ve come to think that that’s an incomplete statement, but nevertheless
useful. And nowhere is it more useful than in consideration of narratives driven
by time travel.

The anthology Worlds Enough and Time casts a net wide and long,
considering movies and television as well as books, and writers from Dante to
Terry Pratchett. A point that is made in different ways by many of the
collection’s sixteen authors is Bourjaily’s assertion turned inside out: most
time travel stories are about narrative structure -- whether the author is aware
of that or not.

David Leiby addresses this directly in his chapter “The Jaws of the Intellect
Grip the Flesh of Occurrence: Order in Time Travel,” arguing that “Time travel
narratives have metafictional characteristics inasmuch as they encourage readers
to think about the construction of narrative.... [T]he subject matter mirrors
the experience of reading a narrative ... [and] may cause a reader to think
about the process of making fiction” (38). He points out that, unlike the
authors we normally associate with self-reflexive fiction, such as Gass,
Barthelme, Coover, and Pynchon, sf writers do not use (or perhaps need)
outrageous stylistic techniques to write about writing.

In his introduction, “The Quarries of Time,” Gary Westfahl ponders the
popularity of time-travel stories with both readers and writers. He notes that
while “the gaudy and magical effects of fantasy, and to an even greater extent
the machinery and jargon of science fiction” (4) perforce are distant from a
reader’s everyday experience, all people are aware of being locked in time, and
are curious about its nature.

George Slusser and Robert Heath consider the state of modern science as regards
the nature of time and time travel in “Arrows and Riddles of Time: Scientific
Models of Time Travel.” They invoke Hawking’s three arrows of time --
thermodynamic, cosmological, and psychological -- and note that most time-travel
stories occur at the “human interface,” where the thermodynamic and
psychological arrows of time interact.

They identify three basic kinds of time-travel tale:
1. The [Wells] Time Machine model: “loop” tales that “reaffirm the fixity of
events on the continuum” (14).
2. The Sound of Thunder model where “time progress is branched”: the traveler
moves into another branch and cannot go home again. Often s/he doesn’t or can’t
exist and the time machine hasn’t been invented, because of some “butterfly
effect,” as in Bradbury’s eponymous story (18).
3. The Solipsism model: “Time progress is an individual protocol where events
happen only for the individual traveler,” in stories such as Heinlein’s “All You
Zombies” (1959) where a person appears to exist in a self-contained loop (21).

Richard Saint-Gelais, in “Impossible Times: Some Temporal Labyrinths in SF,”
talks about the idea of “uchronia” (28), a future that’s not an extension of our
present, but of an alternative timeline, such as in Gilliam’s Brazil
(1985). The term is from Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie (1876), which is an
“imaginary historiography” (29) rather than a novel -- what would history have
been like if the Roman Empire hadn’t adopted Christianity? In novels like Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle (1962), the reader must reconstruct the
novel’s “present” by an accumulation of hints, rather than a bald statement,
which Saint-Gelais calls “novelistic uchronia” (29). The same author’s Ubik
(1969) employs the mirror technique of “pseudo-anticipation” (31), where the
reader’s ordinary world becomes strange to the characters in the near-future
story -- “otherness does not only work in one direction” (32).

Two of the essays deal with cultures distant from science fiction’s
Anglo-European baseline. Susan Kray considers “Jews in Time: Alternate Histories
and Futures in Space,” and although it’s difficult to argue with her central
thesis, that “Jewish characters, like other ethnic characters, are deracinated
walk-ons, ethnic in name only and present merely for the sake of nominal
diversity,” she seems a little too selective in her examples. She cites Jane
Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) as a story typical in that it “distort[s]
history and the aging process in bizarre ways” (87), for instance, but never
mentions the same author’s better known time-travel tale, The Devil’s
Arithmetic (1988), which seems almost tailor-made to counter her central
thesis.

“The Desire to Control Time in Doraemon and Japanese Culture,” by Jefferson M.
Peters, is an engaging survey and analysis of the Doraemon manga, a
series of children’s tales that center on time travel as a mechanism for
juvenile wish fulfillment, usually backfiring, many of which “rank with the best
children’s literature, by being both comical and ethical and having rich
thematic and stylistic textures” (104). These stories by Fujio F. Fujiki, in 45
volumes published between 1974 and 1996, are so all-pervasive in their home
country that it’s fair to say they’re central to a Western understanding of
modern Japanese culture.

My favorite contribution was “Temporal Compression, Fractious History: H.G.
Wells, George Orwell, and the Mutiny of ‘Historical Narrative’,” by Larry W.
Caldwell. It’s a fascinating recounting and analysis of Orwell’s long argument
-- from The Road to Wigan Pier (1933) to 1984 (1949) -- with his literary
foster-father’s utopian notions. Dense in both logic and language (“Orwell
problematizes utopian causation, confronting us, and Wells, with a sort of
cognitive estrangement from both syllogism and dialectic, that is, from
tripartate logico-historical structures of prediction” [32]), Caldwell’s paper
acknowledges that Orwell’s extended thesis requires an extremely selective
reading of Wells’s huge and varied oeuvre, but nevertheless makes important
points about the nature of utopian thought in general, and Wells’s in
particular.

The book is rounded out with “Tall, Dark, and a Long Time Dead: Epistemology,
Time Travel, and the Bodice-Ripper,” by Erica Obey. The article begins by
quoting Derrida, in what seems to me an uncharacteristically lucid and concise
statement -- “A text cannot belong to no genre; there is no genreless text;
there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to
belonging” (157). The subject of the article is Diana Gabaldon’s series of
time-travel romances, about 4500 pages of love and sex (beginning in 1991 and
ongoing). I have to admit I’d never heard of her, even though she’s apparently
among the ranks of New York Times best-sellers. Obey doesn’t claim that
Gabaldon is a great writer:

Her modest claim that she knows nothing about plot is well borne out by her
work. For, despite the endless succession of episodes, her narrative remains
oddly static: a sword fight; a robbery; meeting Prince Charlie; sex; more
swordfights; more robberies; a misstep with a wine importer; Jamie’s capture
by the English; more sex; and then more sex.... [T]he plot simply sprawls from
book to book, the ending of each volume seemingly determined by page count,
rather than by any organic coherence” (164).

From this description, it’s not surprising that Gabaldon’s work is a gold
mine for postmodernists, and Obey has written an amusing and enlightening piece
about her signifiers and significance, which serves as a fitting end for the
anthology. The book has a long and useful bibliography of works related to time
and time travel, including fiction, nonfiction and criticism, and film and
television. Recommended for anyone with a professional interest in time travel
as a fictional device.